A new laser-pointing platform developed at MIT may help launch miniature satellites into the high-rate data game. Since 1998, almost 2,000 shoebox-sized satellites known as CubeSats have been launched into space. Due to their petite frame and the fact that they can be made from off-the-shelf parts, CubeSats are significantly more affordable to build and…
Movement-Enhancing Exoskeletons May Impair Decision Making
As engineers make strides in the design of wearable, electronically active, and responsive leg braces, arm supports, and full-body suits, collectively known as exoskeletons, researchers at MIT are raising an important question: While these Iron Man-like appendages may amp up a person’s strength, mobility, and endurance, what effect might they have on attention and decision…
Researchers Develop Virtual-Reality Testing Ground For Drones
Training drones to fly fast, around even the simplest obstacles, is a crash-prone exercise that can have engineers repairing or replacing vehicles with frustrating regularity. Now MIT engineers have developed a new virtual-reality training system for drones that enables a vehicle to “see” a rich, virtual environment while flying in an empty physical space. The…
TESS Readies For Takeoff
There are potentially thousands of planets that lie just outside our solar system — galactic neighbors that could be rocky worlds or more tenuous collections of gas and dust. Where are these closest exoplanets located? And which of them might we be able to probe for clues to their composition and even habitability? The Transiting…
Robo-Picker Grasps And Packs
Unpacking groceries is a straightforward albeit tedious task: You reach into a bag, feel around for an item, and pull it out. A quick glance will tell you what the item is and where it should be stored. Now engineers from MIT and Princeton University have developed a robotic system that may one day lend…
New 3-D Printer Is 10 Times Faster Than Commercial Counterparts
MIT engineers have developed a new desktop 3-D printer that performs up to 10 times faster than existing commercial counterparts. Whereas the most common printers may fabricate a few Lego-sized bricks in one hour, the new design can print similarly sized objects in just a few minutes. The key to the team’s nimble design lies…
A Concrete Solution
Cement materials, including cement paste, mortar, and concrete, are the most widely manufactured materials in the world. Their carbon footprint is similarly hefty: The processes involved in making cement contribute almost 6 percent of global carbon emissions. The demand for these materials is unlikely to decline any time soon. In the United States, the majority…
Space Junk: The Cluttered Frontier
Hundreds of millions of pieces of space junk orbit the Earth daily, from chips of old rocket paint, to shards of solar panels, and entire dead satellites. This cloud of high-tech detritus whirls around the planet at about 17,500 miles per hour. At these speeds, even trash as small as a pebble can torpedo a…
Engineers Design Drones that Can Stay Aloft for Five Days
In the event of a natural disaster that disrupts phone and Internet systems over a wide area, autonomous aircraft could potentially hover over affected regions, carrying communications payloads that provide temporary telecommunications coverage to those in need. However, such unpiloted aerial vehicles, or UAVs, are often expensive to operate, and can only remain in the…
Engineers Design Drones That Can Stay Aloft For Five Days
In the event of a natural disaster that disrupts phone and Internet systems over a wide area, autonomous aircraft could potentially hover over affected regions, carrying communications payloads that provide temporary telecommunications coverage to those in need. However, such unpiloted aerial vehicles, or UAVs, are often expensive to operate, and can only remain in the…
Scientists Make Huge Dataset of Nearby Stars Available to Public
The search for planets beyond our solar system is about to gain some new recruits. Today, a team that includes MIT and is led by the Carnegie Institution for Science has released the largest collection of observations made with a technique called radial velocity, to be used for hunting exoplanets. The huge dataset, taken over two…
Scientists Make First Direct Detection Of Gravitational Waves
Almost 100 years ago today, Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves — ripples in the fabric of space-time that are set off by extremely violent, cosmic cataclysms in the early universe. With his knowledge of the universe and the technology available in 1916, Einstein assumed that such ripples would be “vanishingly small” and…
Retracing The Origins Of A Massive, Multi-Ring Crater
Scientists from MIT and elsewhere have reconstructed the extreme collision that created one of the moon’s largest craters, 3.8 billion years ago. The team has retraced the moon’s dramatic response in the first hours following the massive impact, and identified the processes by which large, multi-ring basins can form in the aftermath of such events.…
With New Model, Buildings May “Sense” Internal Damage
When a truck rumbles by a building, vibrations can travel up to the structure’s roof and down again, generating transient tremors through the intervening floors and beams. Now researchers at MIT have developed a computational model that makes sense of such ambient vibrations, picking out key features in the noise that give indications of a…
Team Simulates A Magnetar To Seek Dark Matter Particle
MIT physicists are proposing a new experiment to detect a dark matter particle called the axion. If successful, the effort could crack one of the most perplexing unsolved mysteries in particle physics, as well as finally yield a glimpse of dark matter. Axions are hypothetical elementary particles that are thought to be among the lightest…
MIT’s REXIS is Bound for Asteroid Bennu
An SUV-sized spacecraft, loaded with instruments and an extendable robotic arm, will soon be barreling toward a space rock, on a round-trip journey that promises to return an unprecedented souvenir: extraterrestrial soil, taken directly from an asteroid, that could hold clues to the very early universe. This evening, at about 7:05 p.m. EDT, NASA’s first-ever…
New Technique May Help Detect Martian Life
In 2020, NASA plans to launch a new Mars rover that will be tasked with probing a region of the planet scientists believe could hold remnants of ancient microbial life. The rover will collect samples of rocks and soil, and store them on the Martian surface; the samples would be returned to Earth sometime in…
Carbon Nanotube ‘Stitches’ Strengthen Composites
The newest Airbus and Boeing passenger jets flying today are made primarily from advanced composite materials such as carbon fiber reinforced plastic — extremely light, durable materials that reduce the overall weight of the plane by as much as 20 percent compared to aluminum-bodied planes. Such lightweight airframes translate directly to fuel savings, which is…
Algorithm Developed To Reduce Airport Congestion
Over the next 25 years, the number of passengers flying through U.S. airport hubs is expected to skyrocket by almost 70 percent, to more than 900 million passengers per year. This projected boom in commercial fliers will almost certainly add new planes to an already packed airspace. Any local delays, from a congested runway to…
Tough New Hydrogel Hybrid Doesn’t Dry Out
If you leave a cube of Jell-O on the kitchen counter, eventually its water will evaporate, leaving behind a shrunken, hardened mass — hardly an appetizing confection. The same is true for hydrogels. Made mostly of water, these gelatin-like polymer materials are stretchy and absorbent until they inevitably dry out. Now engineers at MIT have…
Researchers Trace Mercury’s Origins to Rare Meteorite
Around 4.6 billion years ago, the universe was a chaos of collapsing gas and spinning debris. Small particles of gas and dust clumped together into larger and more massive meteoroids that in turn smashed together to form planets. Scientists believe that shortly after their formation, these planets — and particularly Mercury — were fiery spheres…
Finding a New Formula for Concrete
Researchers at MIT are seeking to redesign concrete — the most widely used human-made material in the world — by following nature’s blueprints. In a paper published online in the journal Construction and Building Materials, the team contrasts cement paste — concrete’s binding ingredient — with the structure and properties of natural materials such as bones, shells,…
3-D Printing 101
It’s been more than 30 years since the invention of 3-D printing, and yet in some ways the technology is still a frontier of unexplored potential. Three-dimensional printing — and additive manufacturing in general — is the process of depositing material, layer by layer, in patterns determined by computer software, to precisely fabricate a three-dimensional…
Scientists Discover Potentially Habitable Planets
Is there life beyond our solar system? If there is, our best bet for finding it may lie in three nearby, Earth-like exoplanets. For the first time, an international team of astronomers from MIT, the University of Liège in Belgium, and elsewhere have detected three planets orbiting an ultracool dwarf star, just 40 light years…
Apollo 13 Commander James Lovell: ‘Crises Don’t Bother Me Anymore’
On April 14, 1970, 56 hours after the Apollo 13 spacecraft launched into space en route to the moon, commander James Lovell began filming inside the spacecraft’s command module as part of a live television program to be beamed down to three major U.S. networks. The broadcast was meant to give people on Earth a…